30 PAST AGES OF CONQUEST which resulted in much destruction of Coptic churches and in definite annexation, but for some hundred years more no backbone was put into its conquest.

The most serious shock came from within. A race came to the fore whose origin is hidden in doubt, a fact which tends in favour of its coming from other than Arab stock, and probably from the south or west. Certainly the Fung nation possesses characteristics which are not those of the Arab, and retains traces of customs, such as the use of the boomerang, which one is accustomed to associate Avith quite primitive peoples, and is depicted as in use by the ancient Anti against the early Egyptians. They are also addicted—as are the Azande of the south—to eating dog and pig flesh, abhorred of the faithful. Much of the journey described in the following pages passed through their country.

The Fungs began to crowd the Christian blacks of Meroe, coming from the eastward, and, operating from their capital Sennaar on the Blue Nile, expelled them from the large town Soba, near Khartoum. From the fourteenth to the eighteenth century the Fung dynasty was a paramount power, their territory extending from Abyssinia at one time to the frontier of Darfur, as for five years they held Kordofan. They dispossessed the Nuba?

inhabitants of the Ghezireh who may have been added to those in the mountains of Kordofan, where the Nuba tribe, very black in skin, still exists in numbers.